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How To Successfully And Sustainably Scale Your Nonprofit

Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of the Board at The $100 Solution, a global nonprofit focused on service-learning.

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Every nonprofit will face a time when they will ask themselves, “How do we scale our organization?” While words like "growth" and "scale" are becoming buzzwords across all industries, you need to decide what growth or scale means to your nonprofit.

"Scale" can mean many things. It can mean substantially increasing the operating budget to provide more services. Or it may mean growing from a regional to a national organization. Once you’ve determined what scale means to you, that’s when the real work begins.

In order to successfully grow your organization, it's important to have certain structures in place that will allow you to grow sustainably. Without asking some basic questions, you're unlikely to achieve the vision your management team has set.

To effectively scale your nonprofit, here are some areas you, the management team and/or the board of directors need to focus on:

Infrastructure

When expanding your organization, you need to consider your current infrastructure. No detail should go unnoticed.

From a systems standpoint, your organization needs to have the capacity to handle the expected uptick in traffic and information data. Make sure you have the right software and tools to disseminate and organize that data in the way your organization wants and needs.

Additionally, ensure your website is not only up to date, but also can handle the additional traffic to its site. You may not see the traffic uptick overnight, but your team must feel confident that as traffic does increase, it has the necessary bandwidth. On a smaller, but more personal touch, make sure your website is specifically highlighting partners and local or recent projects.

Lastly, get a head start and create policies and/or processes and put them in place. Make sure the processes created are value-added and not confusing or unnecessary.

Budget And Funding

With newfound growth comes greater responsibility -- especially with funds. It is imperative that there is a plan on how to grow your organization’s budget and how to disperse funds to new partners. If you bring on new partners and promise to provide them with funds to advance your mission, it is your fiduciary duty to provide those funds. With that said, there has to be a plan -- preferably already executed -- on how to raise additional funds to provide support.

One additional important note is to make sure your fundraising strategies are sustainable. It is not effective to ask your loyal donors to donate once for a specific project or initiative; you need to create new campaigns and fundraising channels to reach new donors.

Consider grants, if possible, to help supplement and diversify your revenue sources so you don’t rely solely on fundraising, which can be volatile in any given year. Also, don’t forget your past and most loyal donors. They got you and your organization to where it is today. Paint them a picture of what the organization might look like in the future and how their funds can directly help with expanding your reach.

People

Too often, organizations forget the people aspect. When expanding your nonprofit's reach, you need to ensure you have the necessary and right people in place to not only execute against your team’s vision but also effectively handle its newfound growth. Sometimes growth happens overnight, but most of the time, it’s a relatively slow process spanning multiple years. Nevertheless, you will want to be prepared.

Consider sketching (literally) a chart of your organization, including roles and responsibilities for each position. Once completed, you should chart what the future will look like, how the new roles will fit into the organization, the reporting structure and the breadth and/or depth of responsibility.

By doing this, you are identifying key responsibilities and skills your team is looking for as you search to fill those roles. Ideally, you have current volunteers, supporters or staff who can fill newly created roles, but you may have to look outside the organization.

Operating Strategy

After presenting a strategy on what the organization will look in the future, it is important for the management team and board to focus on the minute details of how, operationally, it will successfully scale. I’ve noticed too many presentations where there is a wonderful vision for what an initiative or organization will look like and how it serves a nonprofit's mission, but there is no discussion or details around the building blocks to achieve the vision.

It isn’t the most glamorous part of the job, but paying attention to how the organization will reach its growth goals and how it will effectively manage its growth will help you grow sustainably.

There are many areas to focus on when scaling, but I’ve found that if you focus on infrastructure, budgeting, funding, people and operating strategy, you will be ahead of the game and better prepared.

As CEO of The $100 Solution™, I have faced and continue to face these same questions. When I took over as CEO four years ago, one of the first presentations I gave was a new three-year strategy, including growing the organization’s current footprint. But having been involved with the nonprofit for five years prior to the promotion and my own unbiased analysis of the state of the organization, I knew I could not effectively scale on Day 1 as CEO.

I made sure that the first two years were focused on our internal infrastructure, paying attention to funding and people and creating an operating strategy to make it all work. All this was to ensure we built up the capabilities and resources to support our future growth. Even today, I find myself going through each of the main points I’ve laid out to prepare for our next phase of growth.